Nice, obliging Jules was helped onto the chair, and the desk.
She looked nervous. To be fair, everyone looked nervous; Jules had done Lighter Life last year and then relapsed badly.
Jules turned round, tried to lean back. Everyone tensed. She squealed: ‘I can’t let myself!’
‘Harder than you think, isn’t it!’ trilled Linda, delightedly. ‘It can be surprisingly difficult to let go.’
‘It’s not advisable to mimic fainting from furniture, is why,’ Delia said. She knew she was getting herself into more trouble but she felt too mutinous to care.
Linda turned the swivel eyes of a fanatic upon her.
‘Exactly! Unlearning our inhibitions is real work. De-inhibitisers bring us closer together: emotionally, socially, even spiritually.’
‘I’m the only Christian,’ Ann said.
‘Spirituality can take many forms,’ Linda said, sweetly.
‘That stuff with the aliens that the actors do isn’t religion,’ Ann retorted. ‘Jesus was the son of God, not the son of Zod.’
Linda looked confused and Delia found herself unexpectedly giggling at a bona fide Ann zinger.
After two false starts, Jules let herself drop backwards onto their arms, the slippery sweatiness among the interlinked hands palpable.
As Jules fell towards them, Delia had an awful premonition they’d fail her and she’d perish in the world’s most ludicrously unnecessary death. Spin that, council.
As it was, they staggered slightly but they supported her with ease. Or, they thought they had, until a bloodcurdling scream was emitted.
At first, Delia thought it was Jules, but Jules was still horizontal, blinking up at them. She looked as frightened as everyone else.
As they set her on her feet, Delia turned to see Ann sat on a chair, holding her arm out in front of her, face contorted in a rictus of pain.
‘My arm! My arm!’
‘Heavens above, what’s the matter?’ Roger said.
‘It’s a fracture. I’ve not got the support bandage on today.’
Someone stepped forward to try to examine Ann and she let out another howl.
‘Don’t TOUCH IT!’
‘What did you do to it?’ Delia said.
‘It got shut in a fire door in Chapel St Leonards,’ Ann said. ‘It’s never been right since.’
Delia remembered that tale. The gruesome incident happened in 1989. Ann was only obsessed with expiry dates for food, obviously.
‘Was I that heavy?’ Jules said, quietly, and Delia said quickly, ‘Not at all! Not even slightly! Ann has an old injury.’
Yeah, a sprain of the manners.
‘Do you need First Aid?’ Roger said to Ann.
‘No, I am used to pain,’ Ann said, with a whiff of burning martyr.
‘Who’s our next volunteer?’ he said, trying to restore focus.
‘Shouldn’t you do exercises where I can take part?’ Ann said, beady eyes on a wary Roger. His eyes were suddenly full of: oh my God, I am going to be sued up the pipe on a discrimination and disability ticket.
Delia nearly laughed out loud. Ann truly was a rattlesnake in a Per Una waterfall cardigan.
Roger went into hushed conference with Linda and when they concluded, Linda said: ‘OK, we’re going to move on to a great fun exercise, my favourite. We all tell everyone one fact about ourselves that the group doesn’t know, for discussion! Here’s mine, to kick you off. I’ve seen Del Amitri nearly fifty times in concert and am a founder member of a fan club, The Del Boys and Girls.’
‘Never heard of them,’ Ann said.
After the excitement of Ann squawking, Delia’s hot resentment of the team-building games returned with full force.
Then irritation turned to boredom. Feigning interest in a colleague’s car-booting hobby or childhood sporting achievement wasn’t easy.
As they discussed her diffident gay colleague Tim’s trip to Reykjavik, Delia’s mind roamed the room and wandered out of the window. And then – KABOOM – something suddenly burst into her front brain at the most inappropriate moment.
Like a music hall act leaping through the curtains with splayed jazz hands – ta dah! – while an audience sat in sepulchral silence.
It had happened in the first days of February, earlier this year. Paul had slung his fisherman’s coat over the banister and Delia had seen a card in an inside pocket slide out. She wouldn’t usually have been nosy, but she could spy a teddy bear face. It couldn’t have been for Paul’s nephews – Delia ran the birthday admin for him.
‘What’s that?’ She’d tweaked it out, and found a Valentine’s card, a tooth-rottingly sweet, teenage sort of one with teddies stood in a pyramid formation, their rounded bellies each carrying a letter B-E-M-Y-V-A-L-E-N-T-I-N-E.
Paul had blushed damson. Paul never blushed.
‘For me? Aww! Getting slushy in your old age,’ she teased him.
She’d thought it was odd – Paul thinking of Valentine’s Day for once, the choice of that card. He sometimes came home with a bottle of Amaretto on the 14th of February, the choice of beverage in honour of their first meeting, but cards and flowers weren’t Paul’s way.
‘I’ll get you a different one. Not much of a surprise,’ he’d demurred. Sure enough, Delia received Monet’s lilies instead, although she insisted she liked the cheesy teddies.
Delia added the clues together. It had been for Celine. She had been getting romantic gestures long denied to Delia. And February to May: they’d been seeing each other longer than three months.
She felt as if she’d been disembowelled with a melon baller.
‘Delia. Now you,’ Roger said, turning to face her.
‘What?’ she said, blankly. It wasn’t meant to be insolent; she just felt so howlingly empty. She thought it didn’t matter that work didn’t mean anything because home was everything. Now, she had nothing.
‘Please tell everyone here a fact about you we don’t know.’
Delia blinked. That they didn’t know? Her life?
Her mouth was dry.
‘Last Friday, I proposed to my boyfriend. Then he sent a text meant for another woman to me. It turned out he’s been having an affair. We’ve split up.’
The circle of faces registered a mixture of fascination and astonishment.
‘That’s hardly appropriate,’ Roger said, into the ensuing silence.
‘You said something you don’t know?’ Delia said.
‘Yes! Something we don’t know. Not … that.’
‘Was it meant to be something work related?’ Delia said. She was in a space beyond caring about professional interests or social embarrassment. It was like that time on a campsite when she was so hideously ill with flu she didn’t care about doing a noisy Portaloo poo.
‘No!’ Roger said.
She dispassionately noted that even though she wasn’t trying to be clever, he looked wrong-footed and maybe even intimidated.
‘It should be something innocuous. We don’t need to know about your dirty laundry.’
Dirty laundry?
Delia swallowed and assessed her surroundings. This room, these people, this job. What was it all for, this putting up and shutting up and sucking up? Where did it get you?
‘Well, that’s bullshit. You asked for something personal you didn’t know and I told you something. Now it’s not good enough. Being cheated on isn’t good enough either but I have to live with it. Don’t play stupid “getting to know you” games and then complain about getting to know someone.’
Roger boggled. Everyone else sat bolt upright and poised, perfectly immobile, like Red Setter bookends. Linda looked like she’d been slapped. Ann was enthralled, having forgotten about her osteopathic agony.
‘Here’s something else you don’t know about me. I’m leaving.’
Roger snorted. ‘Then I need you to follow me upstairs and we’ll discuss your notice period.’
‘I’ve saved all my holiday for the honeymoon I’m not having any
more, which is offset against my notice period. So I don’t have a notice period. This is it.’
Silence.
Roger stared at Delia. The room’s attention had now switched to him, like Centre Court at Wimbledon, to see his return volley. Roger pushed his glasses up his nose. He cleared his throat.
‘The council has only just paid to send you on that health and safety course. We’ve nursed a viper at our breast.’
Delia was going to call ahead and say ‘Surprise! I’ve left my job and will be walking into our house at an unusual time of day,’ then asked herself why she was doing it.
She didn’t owe Paul the courtesy. In fact, who was Delia really protecting? If there was anything to interrupt, she needed to know. She didn’t think Paul would risk doing it in their bed when she still had her key, but her parameters for what was or wasn’t Paulness had changed.
Delia felt cold trepidation as she opened the front door, but there was no noise inside. No Parsnip to greet her, either. Paul must be walking him, or he’d taken him to the pub. Delia wondered if Celine had ever petted him, and the rage surged again. She’d be checking Parsnip’s fur for any unfamiliar perfume.
Her phone beeped – a nervous text from Aled’s partner Gina, asking if she was OK. Too little, too late. Delia fired off a brief reassurance that didn’t invite more conversation.
Delia had asked herself what she’d have done if she’d had word of Aled cheating on Gina, and she decided she’d have insisted Aled tell her. She certainly couldn’t have sat there with them and run double books. And condolences-wise, she wouldn’t have limped in with a text, days after the fact, either. It would’ve been bringing a bottle and a box of pastries, and swearing, like a proper friend.
Delia avoided looking round the house, and bolted up the stairs. She heaved the largest trolley case out of the wardrobe, the dark blue one with the hummingbirds on it that Paul complained made him look unmanly in the arrivals and departures hall. A notional unmanliness, as they never went abroad. Parsnip’s infirmity and the pub were powerful draws to stay home.
What should she pack? Delia started flinging underwear and clothes into the case. Had she really left her job? Had the Paul shock made her manic? Was she going against the advice she’d heard more than once, about not making any major decisions in the first six months after a life-changing event?
The front door banged and gave her a thunderclap of the heart. Paul was home, chatting to Parsnip. She heard their dog yap and do his usual three revolutions, chasing his own tail, before settling in his basket. Parsnip didn’t so much sit down as let his legs collapse underneath him.
Delia paused over the suitcase. She knew Paul was staring at her discarded pink coat.
‘Delia? Dee?’ he shouted up the stairs.
She zipped the case and heaved it off the bed, her work bag on her shoulder. Along with everything she had in Hexham, this would do for now.
She pulled it along the first-floor landing as Paul bounded halfway up the stairs.
‘Delia,’ he said, line of sight dropping to the suitcase as he eyed her through the banister spindles.
He looked tired, with a shaving cut on his chin. He was wearing that grey John Smedley jumper that Delia bought him to match his grey eyes, but he wouldn’t win any brownie points because of it.
‘You’re going to Hexham for longer?’
It was strange – Delia realised she hadn’t definitely decided, until that moment. Seeing Paul standing there, she knew she had to leave Newcastle. There were so few certainties now, Delia had to rely on the rare convictions she had. She surprised herself with her resolve.
‘I’m going to London.’
‘What? For the weekend?’
‘For the foreseeable future. I’m going to stay with Emma.’
‘How long have you got off work?’
‘I’ve left my job.’
‘What?’
Paul’s aghast expression was sour satisfaction. She could do surprises too.
‘How come? Are you OK?’
‘Because I got told off for how I run social media and participate in team-building events, and I needed to leave anyway. I haven’t been OK since our anniversary.’
Delia left her luggage trolley for the bathroom raid, filling a toiletry bag with jars and tubes. Paul and his confusion loitered behind her.
‘Do you not think we should talk before you move to the other end of the country indefinitely?’
‘Do you?’ Delia said. ‘Is there new information?’
She zipped up the vinyl flowery wash bag, then did a mental inventory: favourite dresses, liquid eyeliner, laptop. Those were the can’t-live-without essentials, she could buy anything else.
‘We’ve been together ten years, yes, I think there is more to talk about.’
‘So, talk,’ Delia said. ‘I’m going to call a taxi.’
She produced her mobile and booked one for ‘as soon as possible’ while Paul frowned.
‘Come downstairs while you wait for it?’ Paul said.
Before she could stop him, he’d darted round, got hold of her trolley case and bumped it down the staircase, standing it upright in the hall.
Delia followed him and bent down to pet Parsnip in his basket, making it quick so she didn’t cry. She kissed the top of his head, rubbed his ears and inhaled his biscuity smell. He blinked baleful chocolate eyes and did what passed for a wonky Parsnip smile, before resuming snoring. Paul would take good care of him in the interim, she still trusted him that much.
‘Are you leaving for good?’ Paul asked, once Delia had made it clear she wouldn’t be sitting down.
‘I’m leaving for a while. I don’t know how long,’ Delia said.
‘Does this mean you don’t want to stay together?’
‘All I know is, I can’t live here with you for the time being.’
‘… OK. Can I call you from time to time?’
‘You still have my number.’
‘You’ll be looking for work in London?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ll probably be there for a while, then.’
Delia simply shrugged.
‘Can I ask you some questions?’ she said, after a short pause.
Paul nodded.
‘When did you start seeing Celine?’
Paul coloured, instantly. ‘As in a date …? I don’t know …’
‘You went on a date?’ Delia said, to increase the discomfort, folding her arms.
‘No. I mean as in, the day it started.’
‘Was it before February this year?’
Paul frowned. ‘No …?’
‘Later, then?’
‘Yeah. Like I said, about three months ago.’
‘You bought a Valentine’s card. I saw it, and you never gave it to me.’
Paul frowned. ‘You saw one before you were meant to, so I had to buy another one. You still got one.’
‘You never buy me Valentines’ cards.’
‘I know. It being the twentieth anniversary with my parents … it made me more sentimental than usual.’
If he was invoking his parents’ death to get Delia to back down, it was the most craven gambit imaginable. If he wasn’t? Delia’s former feelings finally stirred.
‘So, what date did you get together with Celine? I find it hard to believe that it wouldn’t stick out in your memory.’
Paul ruffled his hair, shifted from foot to foot.
‘Late March,’ he said, gruffly.
‘You know that, how?’
As with the text, Delia had the sense that Paul was trying to edit his reply to filter out sensitive content, but had no time.
‘It was Mother’s Day, the next day.’
‘You said you never even noticed when it was Mother’s Day. Did you go to the graves after all?’
She and Paul had a whole conversation about how he never celebrated Mothering Sunday when his mum was alive, so it had no particular meaning for him. They’d planned to do something for
the anniversary of the crash, in November, though it had been fraught, discussing it with his brother. Michael felt differently about that date: he saw marking it as according importance to a senseless, horrible event.
Delia didn’t know how it felt to lose your parents but suspected you never get to choose which dates in life are significant for you, bar your wedding.
‘No. We talked about it. She asked if I had got my mum a gift.’
Ah. Now Delia got it. Paul’s emotive orphaning had got Celine into bed? The idea that Paul might’ve seduced Celine occurred for the first time, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t properly considered it before.
‘Where did it happen, the first time? The store cupboard? It’s your happy place.’
‘No, I told you. I’d never … do that, in the pub. It was at hers.’
‘She said, fancy a nightcap?’
‘Not exactly. I was locking up on my own after that … and she came back. I was outside.’
‘You went home with her, that easy?’
‘It had been building up. Then there she was.’
‘I need the words. I need to know what was said.’
Paul cast his eyes heavenwards and ground his teeth. ‘Dee, I get this is the grimmest thing. Why torture yourself with the details? It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.’
‘It matters, because it’s the only way I can start getting my head around how you could do this. It’s such a mystery to me, I need to know how you went from “I don’t shag twenty-four-year-olds I meet in my bar” to, “yeah sounds fun, whereabouts in Jesmond?”’
Delia hated how bitter he’d made her sound.
‘She came up and said she couldn’t stop thinking about me and we should do something about what was going on between us. She said you only live once.’ He rattled it out.
Delia sensed what wasn’t being said.
‘She used your parents’ deaths as an argument for why you should cheat on me? I assume she knew there was a me.’
‘Yeah, not much, but she knew.’
‘That is …’ Delia shook her head, ‘Tasteless isn’t even the word, is it?’
‘It sounds worse than it was. Pissed people talking nonsense …’
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